


Portraits

by Captain_Loki



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Artists, Comment Fic, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-13
Updated: 2012-03-13
Packaged: 2017-11-01 22:08:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/361804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Captain_Loki/pseuds/Captain_Loki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With Lorne it’s subtle and suggestive</p>
            </blockquote>





	Portraits

With Sheppard, it’s obvious. He and the city; the way they light for each other as though they’re preening for one another. A serenade, the flashy plumes of a male peacock, the ritual dance in a light show of consoles and door controls.

They flirt.

With Lorne it’s subtle and suggestive. He doesn’t pretend not to know who Atlantis favors, but she has a way of assuaging Lorne’s latent jealousies.

At night, when he’s alone in his quarters or wandering her halls he talks to her and remembers when he was a small child and close to his older sister, and the plant she asked him to take care of, when she went off to college.

“Talk to it every day,” she told him. He thought it was silly, but he never let a day pass without saying something, even a soft hello, or good night. Atlantis hums beneath his feet where he walks, gets warm when he’s feeling chill, grows cool when he wakes flushed and sweating. She stretches out around him and he can nearly see her, like the fragile leaves of the Bromeliad, growing as he spoke.

Evan tells her stories from his childhood, the fort he built in his backyard with his neighborhood friends and how for the first time he truly felt like he belonged somewhere. It was just four walls barely held together by rusted nails but it was his.

He tells her about the stars and how he names them, after people and places he knows and how he looks for them off world when it grows dark and knows that Atlantis is one of them, and she hums her approval, the feeling of it tangible in the air around him.

He sits and speaks to her while he paints. The city laid out before him and he paints her spires, the way the sun illuminates the city and the water sparkles off her piers and he strokes his fingers over the canvas, blue and silver staining his hands like it’s the city itself, like the colors of Atlantis have bled from her and into him. He gives his paintings as gifts, and they all tell him how wonderfully he’s captured this cityscape.

But Lorne calls them portraits.


End file.
